You cannot be providing money and weapons for people who have killed

[0rganism]

186. Technology comes to mind

Biologically, not so much, but our species' true calling card is technology; it's created by us and for us and we shape realities around it. We are gifted creators and craftworkers of the animal kingdom. We build vessels that navigate the planet's oceans as needed, we build vessels that travel to the moon and back, we can survive and even prosper in many terrains and climates, we shape the world around us in ways that other species do not. Other animals make complex dens and nests and some even organize socially, but oh our technology is a thing to behold.

"A lifetime" is not really a standard unit, so think back 100 years. What has changed since then? We have sailed to the moon and split the atom, we peer so far out into the universe that distances are measured in light time and so close into the essence of matter that distances become probability fields, we converge on building miniature stars to harness their energy, we approach the point of creating artificial life birthed from pure logic. Manufacturing, transportation, electrical distribution, computation, media, telecommunications, medicine -- we have done so very much in a century. We've made incomparable amazing progress on a wide range of frontiers. A century ago, we did not have worldwide access to video feeds from independent journalists around the world. A century ago, Gandhi had not yet nonviolently liberated India from the fading British Empire. We have come far indeed.

And yet peace eludes our species. In the end it eluded Gandhi and a divided India. I continue to be amazed that this very obvious goal remains so very difficult for us to achieve.

Call it "wishcasting" if you like, I have a strong feeling we can do better. Maybe we need to have an Apollo-Program-style effort put into world peace. We humans can pull off some amazing stuff when we come together to build, even for a short time.

Yes, there may be some jobs the socket set cannot be expected to do, but with the right tip it may stand in for a screwdriver. It's hard to tell what's impossible in such a complex environment as human interaction; given how much control we assert in our environment, at least we can explore the solution space a bit more before deeming some highly desirable circumstance forever out of reach.